Ace Atkins - Infamous

“Where are you meeting with the Kellys?” Jones asked.

“Sweet Jesus. I cain’t say.”

“Doc, hold ’im straight.”

This time, Arnold took himself a big breath of air before Jones smothered his mouth and forced him back into the sudsy water like a traveling preacher. When the thrashing and tossing suddenly came to a stop, White said, “Think he’s had enough, Buster. Buster?”

But Jones’s mind had drifted from the Skirvin to a train station with long shafts of morning sunlight, to a box canyon ringed by horse thieves and vultures, to the old, weathered hands of Sheriff Rome Shields, passing on his father’s old.45.

“Buster?”

Jones turned to White, and White looked downright concerned. Jones pulled up Arnold, but the man had gone limp. They hauled him out of the tub and set him on the cold tile floor. Jones slapped Arnold’s back and Arnold came to, heaving water and twisting onto all fours and gagging out a few gallons.

White sat on the lip of the tub and lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t look at Jones.

“I met her at a fillin’ station in Itasca,” Arnold said. “I didn’t know who she was till she give me fifty dollar to locate this attorney in Fort Worth named Sayres. My family needed the money. We hadn’t et in days.”

“When was that?” Jones asked.

“Last week.”

“What day?”

“Sunday,” Arnold said. “I recall ’cause we was in church.”

“Quit your lyin’.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you kept the money?”

“No, sir,” Arnold said, rolling to his butt, covering himself up with a bath mat, trying to catch his breath. “I give the lawyer his money and gone back to Cleburne to see Mrs. Kelly.”

“You said Itasca.”

“We met in Itasca, but she rode my family out to this tourist camp in Cleburne.”

“How’d you get to Fort Worth?”

“Trailways bus, sir.”

“And you came back to the tourist court.”

“The lawyer didn’t have no good news about her kin, and she got a little hot about that and wanted me to go back and fetch her machine. Next day, Mrs. Kelly drove me and my wife and daughter to Fort Worth on their way to San Antone. She let me out at the bus station and tole me to get her Chevrolet back and then go on and hire this attorney I know’d in Enid.”

“But you didn’t go to Enid.”

“Not right away,” Arnold said. “I couldn’t find Mr. Sayres, and my resolve had withered,” Arnold said, shaking his head with great sadness. “Did I tell you I’d been traveling with my family? We hadn’t et in days.”

Jones nodded.

“We’d been tossed off our family farm, sir, and didn’t have nowheres to go. I hadn’t had a square meal in some time, making sure any money we found while trampin’ went to my sweet daughter. I guess I’d grown weak in my body and my spirit. Mrs. Kelly give me five hunnard dollar, and when I couldn’t find Mr. Sayres that night, well, I found myself goin’ to a beer hall. I’m a weak man, sir.”

Jones looked up at White. White tried not to grin and just shook his head with the damn shame of it.

“Well, sir,” Arnold said, “one beer led to two beers, and three beers led to a dozen. And when I get to drinkin’, I get to feelin’ lonesome.”

“So you got yourself a whore,” Jones said.

“Miss Rose ain’t no whore,” Arnold said. “I made sure when I asked the barkeep for some company he didn’t call up some damn ole whore. Just wanted some company, is all. A fine lady. What’s the matter with some company in this coldhearted world?”

“Quit your blubberin’,” White said. “When’d you see George Kelly last?”

Arnold shook his head and looked down at his pruned toes. “No, sir.”

“You ready, Doc?”

Doc turned on the faucet.

“I seen ’im Saturday in San Antone,” Arnold said. “First time I’d ever met the feller. He’d been aways, and Mrs. Kelly wasn’t too pleased with him, me, being a married man, understandin’ the whole situation.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“Mrs. Kelly wanted me to pay out her new attorney.”

“So you picked up two more whores and rented out the presidential suite?”

“Now, hold on there,” Arnold said, gripping the edge of the toilet to stand, bath mat held in his fingers over his genitalia. “I’ll have you know these were the same dang whores-I mean, ladies-I picked up last week. They was company, that’s all. Who of us don’t have sin in our heart?”

“You drove back through Fort Worth to pick ’em up?” White asked. “Must’ve been worth it.”

“Hell, it was on the way,” Arnold said. “Sir.”

“Your wife and child still with the Kellys?” White asked.

“My wife’s still in San Antone,” Arnold said. “The Kellys took my baby girl with ’em. Figured it would make ’em look like a family ’case of roadblocks and the like. Promised they’d wire us once they got to where they was goin’ and send Gerry back on the train. Lord in heaven, I’m sick with worry.”

Jones reached onto the towel rack and dried his hands, rolling his sleeves back down to the wrist and slipping back into his jacket, noticing the wet splatter on his pants that would dry quickly in the summer heat. “Come on.”

“Where we goin’?” Arnold asked.

“San Antonio,” Jones said. “To wait on that cable from the Kellys.”

They drove into Chicago at early evening, finding a furnished apartment in the Chicago Tribune classifieds right on State Street down from the Chicago Theatre. They paid the woman a week’s rent, and Kathryn lay across a narrow bed while Gerry explored the kitchenette. George just peeked out a window, watching the El train rattle past, glass shaking in the frame, and said, “It ain’t the Stevens.”

“You said we couldn’t stay in a hotel.”

“I said we couldn’t stay at the Stevens, ’cause we always stay at the Stevens and they know us.”

“They know the Shannons. Or were we the Colemans?”

“They know our faces.”

Kathryn rolled over on her back and unbuckled her shoes, kicking them onto the floor. “God, I’m hungry.”

She looked down at her foot, feeling something strange, and noticed three dime-size holes in her stockings. George stayed at the window, the curtain crooked in his finger, and said, “There’s a joint on State that sells waffles.”

“I don’t want a goddamn waffle,” Kathryn said.

“Looks good. Virginia’s Golden Brown Waffles. I sure would like a waffle. That’d hit the spot. What’d you say, Gerry? How about a waffle?”

“Can you get a waffle with ice cream?” the kid asked.

“You better believe it,” George said. “You can get whatever you want.”

“What time does the Fair close?” Gerry asked.

“Too late today, kid,” Kathryn said.

“You promised.”

“I said we’d go,” Kathryn said. “I didn’t say when.”

Gerry wandered out from the little kitchen, saying the icebox and cupboards were completely empty save for a box of baking soda and two dead roaches. George had bought her a pack of chewing gum back in Missouri, and the girl hadn’t stopped chomping and blowing bubbles for the last two hundred miles. Kathryn wished she’d blow a bubble big enough to drown out her talking and then explode it all across her little face and mousy hair in those pink ribbons.

“Waffles,” George said, again. “I can almost make out something showing at the picture show. Something about a detective with William Powell.”

“Private Detective 62,” Kathryn said, more to herself than anyone in the room.

“How’d you know that?”